Everett Baker (right) with Mr. Preece, Loon Lake, June 1938.
Everett Baker was born in Minnesota and immigrated to Canada in 1916. He settled in Aneroid, Saskatchewan, and took up farming there. He worked for the Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association; served as the Aneroid Co-operative Association's store manager from 1924 to 1935; and worked for the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, traveling across the province to recruit individuals, until his retirement in 1957. In the late 1930s, Baker began to record everyday scenes on Kodachrome slide film, both as a hobby and for professional purposes. At his death, he left 10,000 slides - now the property of the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society, of which he became the first president in 1957. Baker's slides are of exceptional quality: the colours are still vivid; people's poses and expressions are natural and unaffected; and there is a truly artistic flair for composition. Taken at a time when black-and-white photography was still the rule, conditioning the modern viewer to a rather dull view of the past, these slides constitute a remarkably realistic document on the landscapes, farms, towns, and Aboriginal populations of Saskatchewan in the 1940s and 1950s. A sample of them has been gathered in the 3rd Eye Media Productions video, “Everett Baker's Saskatchewan.”
Patrick C. Douaud